Leading Light

How Unity is democratising dynamic graphics, and what it means for the next generation of games

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You couldn’t walk five feet at this year’s Game Developers Conference without bumping into a talk on ray tracing. It was the hot topic of the show, with Unity Technologies announcing it had partnered with Nvidia to offer the engine’s users early access to real-time ray tracing via a preview function in the High Definition Render Pipeline. For developers, it’s a heady proposition: the ability to render industry-leading, dynamic, photorealistic graphics with heretofore unparalleled precision and ease. For players, however, it’s perhaps more challenging to rouse an interest in the nitty-gritty of physically simulated lighting effects – but, as Unity Technologies’ VP of graphics Natalya Tatarchuk explains, it’s about to change the face of videogames entirely.

At its keynote, Unity showed footage of a raytraced 2019 BMW 8 Series Coupé next to shots of the real thing and dared us to tell the difference. HDRP was initially rasterization-only: this is the way games have long rendered 3D objects on a 2D screen, with polygon meshes doing a decent (but computationally intensive) job of rendering high-fidelity scenes. “We’ve evolved HDRP to support ray tracing on whatever frequency you want to support,” Tatarchuk says. “With ray tracing, you are doing global operations, and optical computations in order to compute the resulting shadows from an area light, which is very similar to the way that real light bounces around the environment.”

Instead of pre-entering approximate information about how light